Unicode - AAT vs OT fonts in Revolution

[Richmond Mathewson]

I think that any unicode font is going to throw up more problems than it 
is going to solve,
here's why:

http://mathewson.110mb.com/skt.html  (page not accessible from my homepage)

Now, unless somebody can come up with a way of using numToChar with 
Hexadecimal encoding refs rather
than unicode addresses we are going to be stuck with regard to conjunct 
consonants (and, let's face it, we
all have a secret urge to write 'GNR' or 'GR' in Devanagari from time to 
time).

So . . . I hope, over this weekend to get to grips with taking a free 
Devanagari font "to bits" and popping
it back together as an extended non-unicode ttf font.

Sivakatirswami wrote:
> Richmond:
>
> My crazy "dream" would be to have a revApplet that runs in a browser 
> and/or a desktop client that accesses Tamil-Devanagari (you're right I 
> had the spelling wrong) data from the web server in flat files, or 
> possibly in a dBase... loads the text, edit and sends it back to the 
> server, then can be imported into Indesign, emails etc.  works on all 
> platforms...
>
Um, what is Tamil-Devanagari? Although it is obvious that the Tamil 
writing system has developed from Devanagari, I don't
understand what 'Tamil-Devanagari' is; unless you are intending to write 
Tamil in Devanagari.
> I have also done the indic-text-as-images on web pages, but there are 
> enough mandates for edits, portability, interactivity that no longer 
> works, and the mandate now for all kinds of reasons: moving forward, 
> the data must be in unicode.
NO; it doesn't have to be in Unicode as long as you stick with one 
'in-house' font (which 'old-sweaty-socks' here is trying to provide)
which is embedded in everything, and in the case of your DTP packages, 
available on whatever systems they are running on.
>
> If you *do* manage to build a OT-TTF-Unicode font for Devanagari that 
> works in Rev on both Windows and Mac I would be very, very interested. 
> I'm sure it would probably work in Windows too.
>
> As for keyboards: if you can, stick with standards: on the Mac, 
> there's the Devanagari QWERTY and also the Devanagari (which follows a 
> pattern based on the Devanagari alphabet)  I can send those to you if 
> you need them. Only thing (argh!) both fail to offer key input for 
> udatta and anudatta (stress marks, 0951, 0952) and the only 
> environment that you can use to pick them is from the Glyphs palette 
> in InDesign. 
Sounds jolly tedious.
> If you are inputting into Pages or MSword, there is no input method 
> for those to chars, which are mission critical...
>
>
Surely, what is needed is a TTf font with a proper keylayout that allows 
all those things such as Anusvara that I have
forgotten. {I taught myself a working knowledge of Sanskrit and 
translated part of Srimad Bhagavad-Gita about 25 years
ago as  got a bit fussed by the fact that so many English translations 
of the text seemed to contradict each other; still
have the translated bits, mouldering in a bookshelf} . . . I really am a 
nutty fruitcake.  :)